Protected: Archipelagos of grief: crises partially digested, Expanded Writers Collective Sydney Review of Books., July 2023.
25,081 words written by eight women, over one year. A shared on-line document; a camaraderie of regular zooms. Beyond us, and through us: much personal and collective grief. One day, we took our words to several types of snail. Then we became-snail and nibbled at the mass of words, digesting fragments, leaving trails; collectively oozed slivers of everyday grief.
What Remains?
What Remains?
What Remains?
The Expanded Writers Collective is: anxious. sick. relieved. stressed. resting. working. grieving. so enjoying this process. a coven. a girl band. a support network. friends. settlers. immigrants. fluid. riffing. sonorous. multiple. not playing solo. a reader. a chorus. one of many voices. feeling more comfortable calling myself an artist. a collective.
The Expanded Writers Collective (EWC) seeks forms of writing that function as soft filters rather than hard copies. We embrace fluid forms and ways of knowing that avoid prescriptivism and calcification, while paying radical attention to place and space, and maintaining locally defined values. We respond to and amplify convivial ways to write, rewrite, share and publish that sustain us and networks of individuals and institutions with which whom we work in solidarity. We are Yoko Akama, Pia Ednie-Brown, Martina Copley, Linda Dement, Anna Farrago, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Maria Griffin and Lucinda Strachan.